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oberto Dohnert has announced the release of OS4 1.0 “OpenDesktop” edition, a Xubuntu-based distribution targeting legacy 32-bit hardware, ultrabooks and netbooks: “Today we are proud to announce the general availability of OS4 OpenDesktop 1.0. OS4 OpenDesktop is a 32-bit offering that runs on all legacy 32-bit hardware as well as the newer ultrabooks and netbooks.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

A new Linux kernel file-system has been presented, LanyFS, a.k.a. the Lanyard File-System.

From the patch announcement by Dan Luedtke, “This patch introduces the Lanyard Filesystem (LanyFS), a filesystem for highly mobile and removable storage devices.” The kernel patch then goes on to describe Lanyard FS as “The lanyard file system (LanyFS) is designed for removable storage devices, particularly those small gadgets one would carry around using a lanyard.”

KMSCON is turning out to be a successful and interesting project with high ambitions of being the leading terminal emulator for Linux while running from user-space.

Back in March was when I first talked about KMSCON as a DRM-based terminal emulator when the developer, David Herrmann, was inspired by Jesse Barnes’ guide to hacking with EGL and KMS.

KMSCON is built upon the Linux kernel APIs for kernel mode-setting provided by the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for frame-buffer access to all displays as well as hot-plugging support with the DRM drivers through udev.

An extensive set of patches have been published that allow the Linux kernel to be built with GCC’s LTO (Link-Time Optimization) support for generating a faster Linux kernel binary but at the cost of much greater compile times.

Applications

Are you sick of wasting too much time on trying to find the “correct” tablature for your favorite song? Do you want to learn how to play your favorite songs on the guitar but you have no idea of what notes stand for? Rhythmbox is the answer for you!

Recently I discovered a fantastic 3rd party plugin for Rhythmbox that will search, download and display under a second the guitar, bass and drums tablature of the song you are listening to right now! How cool is that?

Wine

Games

Humble Bundle is a donation based game project where users set their own price for a series of games and can decide the proportion of money to be given to charity and developers. The project is quite successful and the third series of games are now available in Ubuntu.

Evilot is a new Puzzle/Defense game for Linux, where you play as Count Dolfus, a retired evil overlord, that just wants to spend his last days in peace.

The problem is that the small retirement fund you’ve managed to amass, over decades of evildoing, is too tempting a prize for the heroes and adventurers running through the Kingdom of Evilot, so you’ll have prepare your defenses to withstand their fierce attack.

Early last year, Valve mentioned it was working on something called Big Picture mode for Steam, an alternative user interface with controller support designed specifically for use on televisions. According to Gabe Newell, the distribution services’ couch-ready UI is almost upon us. “We should have both Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly,” he told Geoff Keighley in the latest episode of GTTV, noting that the interface would be available on both the current iteration of Steam and the upcoming Linux version. Newell said that Valve has been showing the interface to hardware manufacturers, but ultimately feels that the community will decide its fate. “I think customers will say ‘this is really great,’ or they’ll say it’s another interesting but not a valuable contribution, fairly quickly.” Check out the interview for yourself (and the full episode) after the break.

Uber Entertainment have added the promise of Linux support to their Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation, and not as a stretch goal. The funding is now at $453,000 of their $900,000 goal with 26 days to go. Platforms now confirmed are Windows, OSX and Linux. The rate of funding seems to have flattened out a bit over the past few days, so it will be interesting to see if this announcement affects it in the coming days.

The official release of Valve’s much-anticipated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive title is set to happen on the 21st of August. In anticipation of the launch, Valve has released a new CS:GO trailer.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the latest game in Valve’s wildly-successful Counter-Strike franchise built atop their impressive Source Engine. CS:GO has been in beta for a number of months already while next week will mark its official release. This first person shooter is initially being released for Windows, OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, but a native Linux version will very likely come once Valve begins shipping their Steam client and Source-based games for Linux.

BlankOn is a desktop distribution based on Debian, and comes to use courtesy of some enterprising folks from Indonesia. It uses a highly-modified GNOME 3 desktop environment built with an HTML 5 and CSS 3 custom desktop shell called Manokwari.

Because I am not particularly fond of the GNOME 3 desktop in its default state, I am always on the lookout for a distribution that takes it and makes it a lot more user-friendly. Linux Deepin is one that I like very much, but choice is good, and so I decided to download BlankOn 8, the latest edition of BlankOn, to see what it has to offer.

The @blankonbanyumas project in Indonesia has launched its open source, Linux-based OS that’s fully localized in the Banyumas local language. It launched on Friday, aptly arriving on Indonesia’s 67th Independence Day. Wikipedia describes the tongue as “considered to be a dialect of Javanese.”

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Hmm, it is hard to address the target group of Mageia. A quick answer would be that targets to a lot of people. Yes, Mageia is one of the most popular distros around and is relatively a new one.

Mageia isn’t for enthusiasts, isn’t about the latest packages, isn’t a LTS and it doesn’t ship any commercial support, but is user friendly. The best words I can find to describe it, would be a Community Edition of Canonical’s Ubuntu.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

The Ubuntu Quality Assurance team had earlier created a survey to gather feedback from users regarding differen issues in Ubuntu operating system. The results are out, published in Ubuntu Orange Notebook blog and here are some interesting findings.

Canonical has recently announced a new feature called Unity Previews and this program has got tremendous potential as shown below.

Unity has already got tight integration with different online services, such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Ask Ubuntu etc. What users do is to type in their queries in the dash and the lenses display the results from which users have to click on an item and open it on their web browser. With Previews, one can get more information of an item such as description, ratings, or maybe, even a full web page.

Flavours and Variants

There have been a number of reviews of Peppermint 3 already so I am somewhat behind the pace with this review.

I wrote a review about Peppermint 2 back in February but it didn’t really contain all that much information except to say that Peppermint utilises the idea of cloud computing and wraps it up to make it look like you are running a local application.

As we have moved on a version I thought I’d have another look especially as the reviews have been mainly positive.

If you are student and under 18 years of age, here is an exciting contest from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. A Summer Programming Contest has been announced and anyone under 18 and in education are allowed to participate.

Phones

We’ve just been tipped to a memo circulated internally by HP’s Todd Bradley — who runs the company’s recently-merged Printing and Personal Systems Group — announcing the creating of a new Mobility business unit underneath him that will be responsible for “consumer tablets” and “additional segments and categories where we believe we can offer differentiated value to our customers.” The news comes almost exactly one year since HP killed the TouchPad, effectively ending Palm’s run as a hardware company and throwing webOS itself into an uncertain future as an open source platform.

Android

Double check your calendars – is it April 1st? It’s not? Then there’s been a massive rip in the space time continuum as Motorola has officially published the new “Unlock My Device” page. On the site, Motorola device owners can finally unlock their device’s bootloaders and install 3rd party software. Naturally, there are about one million warnings and hoops to jump through, but it has finally come.

ustomers who bought Samsung’s Android phones since 2010 may not have been as confused as Apple says, according to an internal survey released on Monday evening as evidence in the ongoing Apple v. Samsung trial. Apple conducted the survey and published it internally in January of 2011, as noted by CNET. The goal was to see what reasons customers had for buying an Android device instead of an iPhone, and the results aren’t likely to bode well for the company’s arguments in court.

Thanks to Ngewi Fet and Google Summer of Code 2012 for Gnome, we get the GnuCash App for our Android device. Ok, this is not the most exciting Android App that you will find, but it is Open Source and it can “sync” in a way with your Linux Desktop.

The Android Open Source Project has typically (and understandably) been a very Nexus-focused affair — until now that is. Technical Lead for the AOSP, Jean-Baptiste Queru, announced this week that for a “new challenge” he’d like to target new hardware — and Sony’s Xperia S is the lucky benefactor.

GGA Software Services LLC, a leading provider of outsourced scientific informatics services to the life sciences industry, has released new version 1.1 of its popular open-source organic chemistry toolkit known as Indigo. Scientists at companies and institutions around the world have used this Indigo toolkit widely to secure broad capabilities in cheminformatics.

Google, as you might expect, has massive amounts of data and it’s built many tools to handle it. Stuff like MapReduce and GoogleFS, which spawned the open source Apache Hadoop, and BigTable, which spawned Apache HBase.

SaaS

With more and more organizations moving towards the clouds for its customization, flexibility, and agility, sad to say, large cloud computing providers are not that keen to tap the open environment because doing so will be have negative effects to their financial interests. Since Linux started some 20 years ago, there is a growing demand for openness in the IT arena. Today, there is a growing demand for cloud computing to deliver open source cloud computing applications. OpenStack, a community for the development of open-sourced public and private clouds, is on the forefront with more than 180 organizations around the world as supporters.

Databases

A flaw in the built-in XML functionality of PostgreSQL (CVE-2012-3488) and another in its optional XSLT handling (CVE-2012-3489) have been patched, and the developers have released updated versions of the open source database with relevant fixes. The holes being patched are related to insecure use of the widely used libxml2 and libxslt open source libraries and the PostgreSQL developers advise anyone using those libraries to check their systems for similar problems.

Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.

The issue stems back to a recent discovery that the latest MySQL release has bug fixes but without a single one having any test cases associated with it. That creates all sorts of problems for developers who have no assurance that the problem is actually fixed.

Healthcare

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), an independent, nonprofit, open source organization formed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), has taken an active role in upgrading and standardizing the agency’s VistA electronic health record (EHR). Meanwhile, the role of open source developers in building the joint Department of Defense/VA EHR system is still in flux.

Up to now, it has been difficult for the VA to introduce enterprise-wide changes in its VistA software, said Seong K. Mun, president and CEO of OSEHRA, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. The main problem is that many of the 152 VA medical centers have tweaked VistA to meet their own needs over the years.

Project Releases

Public Services/Government

The use of open source technology in the UK’s public sector has historically lagged behind other European countries, most notably France and Germany, both of which have successfully embraced open source to deliver enhanced value to the taxpayer through efficiency and collaboration.

Standards/Consortia

Dart is a language, library, toolset, and virtual machine from Google that greatly facilitates writing fast, interactive HTML5 apps without requiring you to be a JavaScript expert.

Dart helps developers build fast HTML5 apps for the Web. Currently in Technology Preview (with a Beta release planned for this year), this open source project is building a “batteries included” developer platform that integrates a new language, libraries, an editor, a virtual machine, and a compiler (with JavaScript output).

Facebook Inc. has signed on with a former U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman and other Patton Boggs lobbyists.

Patton Boggs disclosed to Congress on Tuesday that firm partner Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman from 2005 to 2009, as well as partner Jeffrey Turner and senior public policy adviser Emanuel Rossman, are lobbying for the social network. They are focusing on matters concerning “technology and internet policy, including personal privacy, protecting children, advancing online security, and tax policy issues,” according to a lobbying registration report the law firm filed with the U.S. House of Representatives.

I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

I hadn’t realized that the World Wide Web turned 21 this week until I saw the nice birthday card that Megan Garber sent it yesterday. And it’s a good thing I did–because otherwise I would have missed a fabulous recycling opportunity!

Goldman had executed and cleared trades for Bayou, and there were questions about how well Goldman supervised the account. On July 30, Goldman paid $20.7 million to roughly 200 Bayou investors in the United States. Those investors, unsecured creditors in a separate Bayou bankruptcy case, were awarded that amount by a securities arbitration panel in June 2010.

It was one of the few bright spots of the Bayou story, but it didn’t last. The same day Goldman paid the investors, the firm filed its own creditor’s claim for the same amount — $20.7 million — in the Bayou bankruptcy. Goldman contended that paying the award had made it, too, a Bayou creditor. If the court agrees, the investors who won their arbitration case — also unsecured creditors of Bayou — will be out of luck.

Ross B. Intelisano, a partner at Rich, Intelisano & Katz in New York who represented the Bayou investors, said they would fight Goldman’s latest filing.

I asked Goldman last week about the bankruptcy court filing. Michael DuVally, a spokesman, said Goldman never controlled the money at issue in the arbitration.

“Our claim is consistent with bankruptcy law,” he said in a statement. “The arbitration panel, which was not ruling on wrongdoing, determined that money the Bayou funds deposited with us while insolvent needed to be returned to the estate to distribute to creditors. With the ruling, we became a creditor entitled to compensation along with the other victims of the fraud.”

Oracle Corp agreed to pay a $2 million fine to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges that an India subsidiary secretly set aside money used to make unauthorized payments to phony vendors in that country.

A day after we filed an amicus brief arguing law enforcement needs a search warrant in order to obtain cell phone tracking data from wireless carriers, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reached the opposite conclusion yesterday (PDF), killing privacy protections for a large swath of the country.

Internet/Net Neutrality

The U.N. telecoms agency has invited the world’s more than 2 billion Internet users to join a debate about the future of the Internet.

The Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union’s announcement Wednesday follows criticism from civil society groups who say preparations for an upcoming global conference have been shrouded in secrecy.

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The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again